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I wonder, what is the true purpose of this tool? Is it just to deal with Spyware and Malware or is it to cover up your tracks when surfing the net?

I guess my real question is, why would you want to use this? I am asking seriously as I might have misunderstood.

-Deeboe

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
- Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Originally posted here by Deeboe I guess my real question is, why would you want to use this?

Say you're using this with I.E. Say in I.E. gets hit with a nasty ActiveX control that tries to install something else. Instead of installing that "something else" to your hard drive, it only installs within the temporary memory space created by Sandbox I.E. Once you close down your browser, that memory space gets freed (in case Windows needs to use it for something else) and all the data within it gets erased. Thus, that nasty ActiveX control (and the "something else" do no harm because they are flushed along with the memory.

It is, until some finds a way to bypass it and still write to the hard disk. Don't think it can happen? Check this link out: http://secunia.com/product/1440/ This is an early version of VMWare, which runs an OS in a sandbox. The design of Sandbox I.E. is somewhat similar. Granted, based on Secunia's report, none of the latest versions of VMWare have had any exploits found (but that doesn't mean they don't exist), but the possibility is still out there.

Hmm i tried it last night on a old box, and i spent an hour or so browsing some pretty dodgy site's.
and i then restarted the computer into safe mode and performed the usual scans.
And it looks like the program did it's job, nothing noda thing was found on the box.

As i understood it the purpose for running scans in safe mode is because safe mode only lets a very limited set of programs run, and therefore any nasty rootkits, trojans etc that hide them selves from virus scanners in normal operation do not get the chance to start and hide and therefore are visible to the scanner rather then invisible.